Yoko Ono: GROWING FREEDOM's calls to action still resonate in a world that's falling apart, at the Vancouver Art Gallery
As simple as they are at first glance, interactive pieces are by turns metaphorical and meditative, troubling and empowering
John Lennon and Yoko Ono in BED-IN FOR PEACE, in Amsterdam, 1969. Photo: Nico Koster, courtesy of Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono: GROWING FREEDOM runs at the Vancouver Art Gallery from October 9, 2021 to May 2, 2022.
MANY SECTIONS of the major new exhibition Yoko Ono: GROWING FREEDOM are so minimalistic that they appear incomplete. That’s because they are unfinished—entirely by design. This is a show that invites interaction, with works that are far more complex than they at first appear.
A draw for fans of Ono’s husband and late Beatle John Lennon, one half of the exhibition is a more already-realized experience: photographs, audio installations, film, hand-painted posters, and album covers fully trace the pair’s collaborative statements. Those include extensive documentation of 1969’s BED-IN FOR PEACE, in which the bohemian honeymooners made hand-drawn signs and grew their hair out to rebel against the Vietnam war—staying in bed for a week at the Amsterdam Hilton and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. The Canadian connection continues with I MET THE WALRUS, an incredible animated film created out of a reel-to-reel tape made the same year, when a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into Ono and Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced the singer to do an interview.
But to understand those much more famous acts of performance, it’s essential to look at the works of Ono alone—many of them requiring the hand of the viewer to complete.
In the exhibition spaces devoted to Ono’s “instruction works”, a piece of art might consist only of a line of text instructing the viewer to do something. LAUGH PIECE simply suggests “Keep laughing a week”. “Pick up the phone when it rings”, instructs TELEPHONE PIECE, on a simple white sign over an iPhone on a stand.
Elsewhere, empty spaces await your contribution. In the famous MEND PIECE, by a long white table covered with broken bits of white china, glue, and twine, shelves stand ready to display visitors’ repaired tea cups.
Like so many of the instruction works on view here, 1966’s MEND PIECE is deceptively complex. On one level, it feels witty; following through on the project, manipulating the ceramic shards back into their original forms can be a meditative or even joyful experience. But there are much larger political implications in these metaphorical actions.
Cocurator Cheryl Sim points out that Ono’s inspiration was the decimation of Hiroshima. “What she wants us to do is take that destruction and make it into something positive,” Sim says.
Yoko Ono’s MEND PIECE, 1966/2020, detail, from GROWING FREEDOM. Photo by Blaine Campbell, courtesy of Contemporary Calgary
GETTING TO DO THINGS
As with so many other works in the show, that process of putting things back together when the world is falling apart still feels resonant—especially in this COVID-ravaged world.
Sim calls the instruction works “a massive contribution that Yoko has made to history, to contemporary art practice, and also to us”.
“We get to do things,” the curator says on a tour of the exhibit. “People are going to get to touch things, people are going to get to do things, and people are going to mend things—they get to engage with the work in a physical and a spiritual way.” (With hand sanitizer available in generous quantities, of course.)
“She defied the art market,” Sim stresses. “All of these works are really reproducible, and none came in fine-art transport in crates. Think of the 1960s, when high modernism was the rule of the day…and it had to be housed in really sacred spaces called art museums."”
Ono’s ideas take on considerably darker weight in the interactive pieces where she’s solicited work from outside the gallery. One of GROWING FREEDOM’s most indelible installations is ARISING, in which Ono invited women to send in accounts of harm done to them for being women, as well as a photograph of their eyes. The VAG has formatted these submissions into sheets clipped to wires that line the walls. And the collection already makes an impact with only a fraction of the submissions; the VAG will be adding more as they come in.
The effect is a cross-section of pain, across generations of women. The words are powerful and often shattering (“I was trapped because I believed it when he said he was sorry only to abuse me again”; “groped while half asleep, multiple times, by male ‘friends’”). but the eyes—some showing the creases and crow’s feet of hard years, others disturbingly youthful—make them even more soul-piercing.
ARISING is a troubling and deeply empathetic feminist statement from a trailblazer—one of the few women to rise up amid the conceptual, performance, and Fluxus art of the 1960s, and a woman of colour to boot.
But in its collection of voices “arising”, it’s an act of empowerment, too. “It’s a difficult room but it is actually very cleansing,” Sim observes, adding that the sharing of pain allows some to let go and move forward.
To unravel the ideas behind ARISING and Ono’s other works, it’s helpful to look way back at Cut Piece. The VAG shows a fascinating film of this early interactive performance work—created in 1964, before she met Lennon. In it, the artist sat alone on a stage, dressed in her best outfit (“and at that time she didn’t have a lot of resources,” Sim points out), with a pair of scissors in front of her. The audience was invited to take turns approaching her and using the scissors to cut off a small piece of her clothing, which they could keep.
“It gives you a good sense of where she’s coming from spiritually and ethically as an artist,” explains Sim. “It’s egoless.”
That would lay the groundwork for her later calls to action—as well as ongoing themes of the body and selflessness. Sim explains that as Ono’s work progresses over the years, it becomes more and more political and socially engaged.
OF WATER AND LADDERS
She hands that social engagement over to other artists in the VAG’s “exhibit within an exhibit”, WATER EVENT. The piece originated in 1971, when Ono invited 120 artists and musicians to create vessels that can hold water. For this iteration, Ono welcomed several local Indigenous artists to submit or create containers. The interpretation varies widely—Sesemiya/Tracy Williams studied with elders to weave a traditional, watertight basket, while Manuel Axel Strain combines projected video of a performance on Second Beach with a chair that holds a pillow emblazoned with a portrait of his mother. Many of the pieces work in ancestral knowledge and Indigenous connections to water.
In the case of well-known local weaver Debra Sparrow, she says she invited a local Musqueam carver to create a small wooden canoe—not just as a symbol of the water as Indigenous people’s waterways. It’s important that the carved canoes were banned for decades under the Indian Act. And in the exhibit, filled with water, the vessel also takes on a new meaning: “Now we have to bring the water inside the canoe to save it,” Sparrow says. She’s named it Imagine.
“I hold my hands up to Yoko for recognizing the value and importance of water,” Sparrow says, reminding people that Lennon and Ono spoke about Indigenous rights long before most politicians did.
Yoko Ono’s CEILING PAINTING, 1966/2020, from GROWING FREEDOM. Photo by Blaine Campbell, courtesy of Contemporary Calgary
What perhaps speaks most movingly about the show however, and pulls together its diverse threads, is the fact that one of the people who responded to Ono’s calls to action was Lennon himself.
Ono has weathered a lot of haters over the decades—some still blame her for the breakup of the Beatles. But if GROWING FREEDOM exposes anything, it’s how Lennon was drawn to her as a kindred artist.
And so it is that one of the most poignant pieces in GROWING FREEDOM is CEILING PAINTING—again, an installation that looks deceptively simple, perhaps even satirically so, unless you know the whole story behind it. A white step ladder sits in the middle of the room, a magnifying glass attached to it by a chain. When you climb up and hold the spyglass near the ceiling, you’re able to read a single, tiny word there: “YES”.
Lennon himself climbed the ladder and viewed the work on a preview night for Ono’s 1966 show in London—the same evening they met. The now legendary story holds that he felt so positive and relieved at finding that single word of affirmation there that he felt inextricably drawn to the woman who had conceived it. She, of course, had no idea who he was.
That beautiful bit of lore adds to the experience of what might at first seem like a trivial task. You’re actually working your way toward hope in the piece—even if the ladder, thanks to today’s safety standards, is shorter than the one the Beatle had to scale.
The opening day of the VAG show, October 9, 2021, would have marked Lennon’s 81st birthday, and it’s nice to imagine what he’d think of gallerygoers, pulling themselves out of a pandemic-ravaged world, still teetering to glimpse that word on the ceiling.
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